Socialism is victorious the aspect of the world will be terrible. The European horde will rush upon the weak and barbarous peoples with redoubled force, and will enslave them, in order that the ancient proletariats of Europe may debauch themselves at their leisure by idle luxury, as did the people of Rome.[1]
Happily the principal energies of Socialism spend themselves in smoke in speeches, like those of M. Jaurès.
“What an admirable orator! There is something of everything in his speeches—and there is nothing… Socialism is a little like our Russian orthodoxy: you press it, you push it into its last trenches, you think you have got it fast, and suddenly it turns round and tells you: ‘No, I’m not the one you think, I’m somebody else.’ And it slips out of your hands… Patience! Let time do its work. There will be socialistic theories, as there are women’s fashions, which soon pass from the drawing room to the servant’s hall.”[2]
Although Tolstoy waged war in this manner upon the Liberals and Socialists, it was not far from it to leave the field free for autocracy; on the contrary, it was that the battle might be fought in all its fierceness between the old world and the new, after the army of disorderly and dangerous elements had been eliminated. For Tolstoy too was a believer in the Revolution. But his Revolu-
